By the end of the 1950s the experience gained from efforts to promote economic development showed great differences among developing countries. Some had broken away relatively quickly from the import-substitution, government-control and -ownership pattern that had been the early development wisdom. Others persisted with the same policies for several decades. A great deal was learned from the experiences of different developing countries.

Despite early emphasis on industrialization through import substitution, a first major lesson of postwar experience was that there is a close connection between the rate of growth in the output of the agricultural sector and the general rate of economic development. The high rates of economic growth are associated with rapid expansion of agricultural output and low rates of economic growth with the slow growth of agriculture. This is (in hindsight, at least) to be expected, since agriculture forms a large part of the total domestic product and of the exports of the developing countries. What is more interesting is that the expansion of agricultural output was by no means confined to those countries with an abundant supply of unused land to be brought under cultivation. Taiwan and South Korea, with some of the highest population densities in the world, were able to expand their agricultural output rapidly by a vigorous pursuit of appropriate policies. These included the provision of adequate irrigation facilities, enabling a succession of crops to be grown on the same piece of land throughout the year; the use of high-yielding seeds and fertilizers, which raised the yields per acre in a dramatic fashion; provision of adequate incentives for producers by setting producer prices at reasonable levels; and improvements in credit and marketing facilities and a general improvement in the economic organization of the agricultural sector. Agricultural development is important because it raises the incomes of the mass of the people in the countryside; in addition, it increases the size of the domestic market for the manufacturing sector and reduces internal economic disparities between the urban centres and the rural districts.

A second conclusion to be drawn from experience is the close connection between export expansion and economic development. The high-growth countries were characterized by rapid expansion in exports. Here again it is important to note that export expansion was not confined to those countries fortunate in their natural resources, such as the oil-exporting countries. Some of the developing countries were able to expand their exports in spite of limitations in natural resources by initiating economic policies that shifted resources from inefficient domestic manufacturing industries to export production. Nor was export expansion from the developing countries confined to primary products. There was very rapid expansion of exports of labour-intensive manufactured goods. This phenomenon occurred not only in the extremely rapidly growing, newly industrialized countries (NICs)—Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, as well as Hong Kong—but also from other developing countries including Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey. Countries that adopted export-oriented development strategies (of which the most notable were the NICs) experienced extremely high rates of growth that were regarded as unattainable in the 1950s and ’60s. They were also able to maintain their growth momentum during periods of worldwide recession better than were the countries that maintained their import substitution policies.

Analysts have pointed to a number of reasons why the export-oriented growth strategy seems to deliver more rapid economic development than the import substitution strategy. First, a developing country able to specialize in producing labour-intensive commodities uses its comparative advantage in the international market and is also better able to use its most abundant resource—unskilled labour. The experience of export-oriented countries has been that there is little or no disguised unemployment once labour-market regulations are dismantled and incentives are created for individual firms to sell in the export market. Second, most developing countries have such small domestic markets that efforts to grow by starting industries that rely on domestic demand result in uneconomically small, inefficient enterprises. Moreover, those enterprises will typically be protected from international competition and the incentives it provides for efficient production techniques. Third, an export-oriented strategy is inconsistent with the impulse to impose detailed economic controls; the absence of such controls, and their replacement by incentives, provides a great stimulus to increases in output and to the efficiency with which resources are employed. The increasing capacity of a developing country’s entrepreneurs to adapt their resources and internal economic organization to the pressures of world-market demand and international competition is a very important connecting link between export expansion and economic development. It is important in this connection to stress the educative effect of freer international trade in creating an environment conducive to the acceptance of new ideas, new wants, and new techniques of production and methods of organization from abroad.

Another major lesson that was learned is that poor people are, if anything, more responsive to incentives than rich people. Nominal exchange rates that are pegged without regard to domestic inflation have strong negative effects on incentives to export; producer prices for agricultural goods that are set as a small fraction of their world market price constitute a significant disincentive to agricultural production; and controls on prices and investment serve as significant deterrents to economic activity. Indeed, in most environments, controls lead to “rent-seeking” behaviour, in which resources are diverted from productive activity and instead are used to try to win import licenses, or to get the necessary bureaucratic permissions. In addition, in many countries, “parallel,” or black, markets emerged, which diverted resources from activities in the official sector. In some countries, legal exports diminished sharply as smuggling and underinvoicing intensified in response to increasing discrepancies between the official exchange rate and the black-market rate.

As a corollary to the lesson that controls may strongly divert economic activity from an efficient allocation of resources, it became increasingly evident that inappropriate incentives can adversely affect economic behaviour. The response of agricultural supply to increases in producer prices is considerably stronger than was earlier believed. Likewise, individuals respond to incentives with respect to their education and training. Thus, much of the overinvestment in education referred to earlier came to be seen as the result of artificially inflated wages for university graduates in the public sector and of the fact that university education was virtually free to students in many developing countries. As a consequence, students perceived an incentive to obtain university degrees, even when there was a chance that they would remain unemployed for an extended period of time. When they did eventually find employment, the high wage would compensate for their earlier period of unemployment. Privately, such behaviour makes good sense in response to existing incentives; socially, however, it represents a waste of valuable and scarce resources.

In the modern view of development, an open, expanding international economy is the greatest support that the developed countries can provide for developing countries. Foreign aid can be extremely helpful in situations in which policies are conducive to development, but development will in any event be accelerated if the international economy is experiencing healthy growth. Removal of the trade barriers that developed countries have erected against developing countries is at least as important as economic aid. Trade barriers are many. They include restrictions on temperate-zone agricultural products and sugar; restrictions on the simpler labour-intensive manufactured goods (which often can be produced more cheaply in developing countries) including especially the Multifibre Arrangement under which imports of textiles and clothing into developed countries are greatly restricted; and tariff escalation, or higher rates of duties on processed products as compared with raw materials, which discourages the growth of processing industries in the developing countries. The removal of these trade barriers can help those developing countries that have already shown their capacity to take advantage of the available external economic opportunities to grow even more satisfactorily and can also provide additional incentives for other developing countries to alter their economic policies.